


and how she gave me life

by orphan_account



Category: Some Velvet Morning- Lee Hazelwood & Nancy Sinatra
Genre: Embedded Images, Gen, Snakes, Western
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21965191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	and how she gave me life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cyphomandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/gifts).



Drinking. It’s the drinking that does you in, headed up from Carson City into Inyo County and places so dry your sweat won’t even soak into the dirt, it’s so unfamiliar with moisture. I had a woman up in that God-forsaken country, and I lost her several times to the drinking. She said Lee, if you pick up one more bottle I’m leaving. And then she left.

That’s the graveyard on the side of town I used to sit by when I got to thinking. Most of those graves are only around, eh, 100 years old at the most? But there’s one that’s older than that. Can’t read it, though. Everything’s worn off.

So one afternoon I was sitting there, thinking about Nancy leaving me again when I saw _her_ come slithering around. See, since birth I’ve been followed around by a rattler. It runs in the family. 

A long time ago when Grandaddy Hazlewood was running from the law on some busted cattle rustling charges a rattlesnake bit the sheriff in the leg. Then the snake stood up and became a woman, who he married. And she loved him until they were both old and gray, at which point he died. Grannymaw didn’t know humans do that- snakes just step out of their old skin young as the day they were born. She’d been around since the colonial times with de Niza and Vasquez de Coronado and all of them. So she got mad and laid a curse on the Hazlewood men for breaking her heart like that.

That’s their old house. She ain’t been human since April 14th, 1938, the day after Grandaddy’s funeral. But she can’t stand to be left out of anything. So at every Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter somebody always has a big ole rattler around their necks.

When Grandaddy died and she was a snake again I was 9, and real sneaky on account of being a quarter snake. So when she curled around my ankles and led me outside I followed. And we went up to the grave so old it couldn’t be read. The stone was pried away and you could walk into the land underneath the ground.

Down there it’s hot cause the lava comes up near the surface. So the snakes come when they’re wearing their skins, and they taste the news and hiss secrets. It’s hard to explain if you ain’t ever been a snake. But she took me walking to the heart of the cave, where Phaedra sat.

Who’s she? Well, a long time before even Grandaddy was born there was a traveling circus with an animals show, and one of the animals was a python. Real pretty one, maybe 30 feet long, and magic as magic could be. They took her all up through Minnesota and the Dakotas until she caught sick, but when the troupe to hot Seven Springs she recovered enough magic to break her cage open and eat all the keepers. That python found her way down to the land underneath the ground and became known as Phaedra. 

On the day I met Phaedra, she told me three things- in snake language, of course. Grannymaw translated. She said I’d be a drunk, that I’d break my left leg on the Chisholm Trail, and that I’d die but still live in Radon Valley. And by the time I was sitting and thinking in the graveyard looking over the valley again the first two had come true. 

That’s Radon Valley. Tomorrow when I’m sober me and Grannymaw are going to walk down that road, and I’m going to shed my old body like she does her skin at Phaedra’s gate. Cause snakes live forever but humans don’t, and I ain’t living seventy-five years just to die at the end. You won’t see Lee Hazelwood laying in this cemetery, no Lord...


End file.
